Do you ever get the sense that human civilization is a juggernaut that basically has no one steering? Our activities have become this unstoppable force that tramples anything that gets in its way but basically has no idea where it’s headed. Now there are lots of people and their leaders who try to direct things but most of them seem to be idiots or so completely selfish that they only recognize their own priorities or even if they seem to exhibit some altruism, they’re completely mistaken in their beliefs about what are the important problems or at least what are the right things to do about them.
And now that humanity has increased to more than eight billion souls and with our capabilities to destroy enormous numbers of people with weapons of mass destruction, we seem to be constantly on the brink of blowing the whole furiously spinning human enterprise to smithereens.
I am aware that this is hardly anything new. Going back to 1945 and Hiroshima we have been living in the shadow of Armageddon now for eighty years. And going back to 1914 we have for well over a century been living in the seeming collapse of European Renaissance civilization. But it does seem to have reached a breaking point. With the current trends we have seen concerning population decline and apparent rampant psychiatric collapse of a sizable percentage of young people we must be reaching the point where either someone or some group rallies a core of people to step back from the brink of collapse or this whole civilization will break down into a dark age; something like what happened during the so-called late bronze age collapse.
In general, it looks like there needs to be a sanity check on what we value. The current social media environment is so dysfunctional that if someone proposed destroying the internet he might become the next prophet; whether you want to compare him to Mohammed or Martin Luther. But whatever the solutions that are selected there is no doubt at all that our present trajectory is disastrous. And I have named religious reformers because it is obvious that the primary problem is not economic or technological. It is spiritual, or if you prefer, psychological. We have allowed nihilistic concepts and other harmful ideas to percolate into young minds through teachers who shouldn’t be allowed to interact with children. And it’s having dire effects. For this reason, it will require a reset of what we teach children. I’ve begun to hear that some states and localities are purging the trans-gender subject matter and teachers from their schools. But it’s going to take a much more systematic approach to get a handle on this poisonous influence on children. And I fear that places like California it’s already too late to fix. People will have to flee to save their kids.
The real question in my mind is, “Is it too late?” At a certain point if a society can no longer provide the basic services and protections for its people, they will flee in search of a refuge. It happened in the bronze age Eastern Mediterranean. Can it happen here? I think so.